A Disappearance in Damascus (2 page)

I too had come to Syria on a standard-issue tourist visa. It's what I usually do when reporting from places where journalists are viewed with suspicion. To request an official journalist's visa is to advertise your intentions to those whose job it is to get in your way. In the old days they would have to follow you around, but now they can watch your
computer and listen to your phone. They can restrict your movements, decide where you can go, whom you can talk to, how long you can stay, and make trouble for whoever talks to you. Over the past seven years of international reporting I'd learned that the wisest course is to keep your head down and ask permission from no one. That way no one knows what you're up to, and they aren't obliged to think up ways to stop it.

In the letter accompanying my visa application I explained that I was a professor who had studied classical Arabic and wished to see what remarkable sights Syria had to show me. This wasn't a lie. I teach at a university, had studied if never mastered Arabic, and Damascus was a place I'd always wanted to see.

To everyone I met, unless I was interviewing them, I was just a tourist here. To the idle curious; to the sultry neighbour in the apartment below mine, on her second marriage, who told me her life story over tea; to the talented family of artists I befriended after stumbling upon their craggy studio built into the ancient city walls; to the taxi drivers shooting the breeze (or gathering information, maybe)—to all of them I was simply a professor on holiday. I was just interested in art or archaeology or architecture or history or Sufi poetry. Which indeed I was.

A bus with purple velvet curtains had pulled into the dirt parking lot, its passenger windows shot out. Leaving the trio of engineers, I went over to inquire, clambering up for a look inside. The driver told me it had happened in the early hours of the morning in Baghdad; US forces were on patrol and simply strafed the area.

The cameraman I had spoken to earlier ran over to check it out. He poked his head inside the bus but decided it was not worth filming. “This stuff happens all the time.”

“That's true.” The driver nodded sagely. “It happens all the time.”

It didn't use to happen all the time.

Understanding how the invasion of Iraq led to such a chaotic civil war requires some knowledge of the nation's demographics. Iraq is composed of three main groups: Shia Arabs, Sunni Arabs, and Kurds, along with a patchwork of small minorities, some of whom have lived there for thousands of years. The two main branches of Islam, the Shias and the Sunnis, are no farther apart than Protestants and Catholics, which is to say, far enough. The Shia are the majority in Iraq (more than 50 percent, which would win any ballot-box competition), but Sunnis, Saddam Hussein among them, have traditionally held power. (Indeed, the broader Middle East—aside from Iran and Syria—has long been in the hands of Sunnis, who are nine-tenths of the world's Muslims.) Nevertheless, the Iraqi people lived mostly at peace with their neighbours. So much so that by 2003 nearly a third of the population had intermarried, and most major towns and cities were mixed.

Besides envisioning a peaceful outbreak of democracy once Saddam Hussein was toppled, Washington's war planners hadn't thought ahead. Brutal dictator though he was, what they failed to consider when they decided to remove him were the dire consequences commonly observed whenever a strong central power is removed without adequate civic institutions in place. In a diverse society that lacks such
unifying structures, there are two tendencies when authority breaks down: a disintegration into communal groups and violence. When governments falter, people turn to anyone who can provide security and basic needs, by whatever means.

With Saddam Hussein felled by George W. Bush's invasion and regime change, Iranian-allied Shia were handed power, along with the Kurds; Sunni Arabs were sidelined, lumped together as if they hadn't also suffered under Hussein. Even worse, and with far-reaching consequences, were two orders issued by the Americans under their chief administrator, L. Paul Bremer III, a former ambassador to the Netherlands who had no prior experience in the Middle East—or any conflict zone for that matter. Taking instructions from a secretive Pentagon agency called the Office of Special Plans,
⁵
Bremer purged Baath Party members from national institutions including schools, hospitals, ministries and corporations, firing a hundred thousand of the country's white-collar professionals, a Sunni-dominant class.
⁶
He then dissolved Iraq's army, police and intelligence services, leaving half a million men trained in nothing but war suddenly jobless and afraid for their lives.
⁷

The purge amplified as Shia death squads began showing up after dark in Sunni neighbourhoods; torture chambers were run out of the Interior ministry. Before long a thousand bodies a month, most of them ordinary Sunni civilians, were piling up in Baghdad's morgues. Ex–Baath Party officials and ex–army officers were the first targets of the death squads and were first to flee the country, followed by the intellectuals and anyone who had worked for the US coalition forces.

Then, three years after Hussein's removal, came a devastating bombing that launched the civil war in earnest. In
February 2006, the golden dome of an eleven-hundred-year-old Shia shrine was blown up in the ancient mixed city of Samarra. The bombing was blamed on an Iraqi al-Qaeda franchise, a new group of fighters from Iraq and surrounding Sunni states, particularly Saudi Arabia, bent on bringing down the Shia-led government.
⁸
Later that year, al-Qaeda joined with other Sunni extremists to form the Islamic State of Iraq, the precursor of ISIS.
⁹

Before the bombing in Samarra, there had been lists of specific targets, but now any man or woman found to be Sunni or Shia, or a minority—Christian, Mandaean, Yazidi, Palestinian—could be stopped on the way to work, their identities inferred from the names on their ID cards, and tortured to death, or simply gunned down in their homes. At the UNHCR registration centre in Damascus, where crowds of refugees lined up each morning at dawn, clerks took down their reasons for fleeing. “I get sick from the stories,” a fresh-faced young Syrian clerk had told me. She meant it literally: she sometimes had to excuse herself to throw up. But with neighbouring countries refusing them refuge (Jordan had already taken half a million or more), Syria was the last exit from the killing fields.

Driving back the way I had come, I watched the setting sun burnish the desert pinkish-gold. Power poles loomed over desert scrub and green patches of irrigated farmland. The highway was calm, my driver silent and brooding; he found the refugees worrisome. “Speaking as a Syrian,” he had earlier told me, “we don't want their war to come here.”

The refugees would be following in the same direction, many of them bound for a crowded suburb of Damascus
where rents were particularly cheap: Sayeda Zainab. Little Baghdad it was being called now. I had been to that neighbourhood a couple of times already. Home to the largest community of Iraqi refugees in the world, it would make an ideal base to research my
Harper's
article on the crisis.

I wanted to immerse myself there, in the lives of the people, but how would I do it? To enter a traumatized community, I needed to find someone the community trusted who could make introductions; I needed a good fixer.

As the lights of Damascus beckoned, it occurred to me that I might already have found that person.

THAT EVENING, BACK IN DAMASCUS
, I called Ahlam.

I suggested a meeting; she named the time and the place. Nothing more was said over the phone. After that meeting we began working together. She would give me a new way of thinking about war, about what war does, and what it takes to survive. She would become my friend.

I like to work alone, to wander around, look and listen and ask questions, but that is not always possible or wise. Which is when a journalist like me needs a trustworthy guide, someone to act as a go-between, traverse the barriers of language and culture, and gain the trust of people who are unwilling to talk to outsiders. Often the first question put to me by Iraqis in Damascus was—for whom was I spying? They were on the run from strangers who wanted to kill them, so why should they answer questions from a stranger like me?

Given the time it takes to immerse yourself in a culture and do the complex work of observational journalism that requires gathering and cross-checking a complicated array of
sources and material, there are few of us compared to reporters covering daily news. And with the collapse of news budgets and the shutting of foreign bureaus in favour of cheaper forms of newsgathering (like, say, not bothering at all), even those are thinner on the ground. To do the work of immersive journalism means being something of a go-between oneself. What I strive to do is bridge the gap between the readers of the magazines I write for, such as
Harper's
or
The Economist
, and people in troubled places who such readers would never otherwise meet. We talk about them, make policies to deal with them, even make war on them, while knowing almost nothing of who they are or what consequences our actions might have.

To write a successful story I have to emerge from the field with an accurate representation of confounding, potentially dangerous situations. Another way of describing immersive journalism is “hanging out journalism,” which can feel a lot like “drowning journalism” or “thrashing around journalism,” especially at the start when I'm getting my bearings. To gain the access and understanding on which this work relies occasionally requires the help of someone informed and connected, whose judgement I trust. In the lingo of journalism, such a person is called a fixer. If a fixer were European or North American, he or she would be called a field producer or a media consultant. A fixer is the local person who makes journalism possible in places where the outsider cannot go alone. Arranging interviews, interpreting, providing context and background, sensing with their fingertips the direction of the winds, fixers are conduits of information and connections. And when they say, “It's time to leave,” it is always time to leave. Without these local experts, who may be anyone
from a doctor with good contacts to a university student with street smarts, most of the news from the world's dangerous places would not be known, though by the nature of their work, they themselves remain invisible.

Fixers are informally contracted, working for a matter of hours to a matter of months, and tend to fade away once the job is done, but they take risks on behalf of the story that even the journalist might not take. Some fixers, in places where a foreigner would not stand much chance of coming back alive, gather the information themselves while the journalist waits at the hotel to type it up. And when the foreign correspondent goes home, the fixer stays behind. “I avoid fixers,” writes the war photographer Teru Kuwayama, “because so many of the ones I've worked with are dead now.”
¹⁰

Generally speaking, I avoid them too, preferring to find my own way around. In my
Oxford English Dictionary
, a fixer is “a person who makes arrangements for other people, especially of an illicit or devious kind.” That is indeed exactly how the Syrian government saw anyone who worked with Western journalists, and why—on a different level—journalists are wary of fixers. Those fixers who are close to a government (or other power structures, such as rebel groups or political parties) may, depending on their allegiances and the incentives involved, turn out to be more like minders, working as double agents without the journalist being aware of the fact. A Syrian working as an “official” fixer, for example, would have to report to the Ministry of Information in Damascus, a ministry with a mandate the opposite of its name. And since a fixer receiving permission to work from the Ministry could earn in a day or two the same two hundred dollars that a Syrian government employee earned in a
month, there was incentive to tell the Ministry whatever the Ministry wanted to know.

I had only been there once since I arrived, to the daunting eighth-floor office of the Ministry of Information, to request permission to visit the border. That day I had carefully dressed in what I thought might pass as professorial garb: grey pencil skirt and black French-cuffed shirt, hair pulled back tautly as if I were about to give a lecture on Baudelaire. When the director, a tall and sorrowful-looking man with a reputation for disliking reporters, asked me directly if I was a journalist, I said no. “I'm a professor and a writer.”

If I were to stay below their radar, whoever helped me would have to be below the radar as well. The week I arrived, I had managed to locate two good interpreters: Kuki, a young refugee from Baghdad I'd heard about from a researcher at Refugees International in New York; and Rana, a schoolteacher from Damascus who came recommended by an American radio journalist based in Jordan. Rana was thirty-four and unmarried, despite (or because of) being attractive and educated. She had turned down many suitors because she didn't want a controlling husband or a backward one. Though she was studying at night towards a second degree in international law, she still lived with her parents in an apartment where she and four sisters, all university-educated, slept in a single giant bed. “Like kebabs,” Rana said.

That first week I camped at the Damascus apartment of a freelance filmmaker from New York who had sublet me a mattress on her balcony. She was a skinny redhead in her early thirties with a finely calibrated register of anxiety—not a bad quality for a journalist to have unless it tips over the edge. Which it did the morning the air conditioner died.
Admittedly, in the midst of a heat wave, this was a crisis. Standing in the bare-bones kitchen, stirring instant coffee into boiling water and still not quite awake, I listened to her screaming over the phone at her landlord. She wanted him to come over and fix the problem immediately so she was layering it on, simultaneously claiming the malfunction had made her ill, praising the great country of Syria, and alluding to having spoken to “officials” and “police” who all agreed that he had overcharged her on the rent. Of course she wasn't ill; Syria wasn't great; and we assiduously avoided officials and police. They considered all foreigners spies, which is how we saw them in return. She had even put a picture of President Bashar al-Assad on the outside of our door, hoping to allay any suspicions about the possible journalistic activities taking place inside. And the rent, though almost as much as she paid for her half of a spacious loft in Brooklyn, was in line with demand: rents in Damascus had suddenly tripled with the arrival of more than a million middle-class Iraqis carrying their life savings in cash.

I'd enjoyed sleeping under the clear moonlit sky on her balcony, lulled by the hum of late-night traffic. But I needed a room, not a balcony, and after much searching I'd found my own place. It was on the fifth floor of a downtown walk-up, since Syrians, the owner wistfully conceded, objected to climbing more than three flights of stairs. Too small for more than one person, it was one of the rare Damascus rentals that didn't have crowds clamouring to pay whatever the landlord wanted. I was glad to be getting out of the overheated apartment and away from a roommate who had recently discovered that the pharmacies here didn't require a doctor's prescription to give her all the Xanax she needed.
I was going to be on the top floor, above everything, looking down on the city, able to see without being seen, invisible, almost omniscient: a writer's fantasy. I was going to understand everything that went on, I imagined, and would avoid being caught up in any of it.

Rana and Kuki weren't fixers: neither had connections or could lead me to sources, though both were game for helping me with whatever I had in mind. Kuki had been an interpreter in Iraq. Not for the army, but for one of the companies that made a fortune supplying overpriced goods to the army. He was young, educated, upper-class, subsisting on money from his parents in Baghdad, a professor and a lawyer whom he'd left behind after a letter arrived on their doorstep threatening to murder the entire family unless their gay son left the country. He came with me on a number of early exploratory interviews and said it made him feel better to see people worse off than he was. Before the war he had been a fashion model in Baghdad—he showed me his portfolio—and he was still vain, refusing to tone down his rock-star attire of tight black T-shirt and white-framed sunglasses even when we were working. Wherever we went, people stared.

One night the two of us went to a bar in the Old City, down tangled alleyways, under a pink neon sign. It was salsa night, hot and smoky, and a steamy, sexy crowd was shouting to be heard. Posters on the wall advertised a visiting European DJ. We drank the pink drinks that came with the cover charge.

I told anyone who asked that I was a professor of fine arts. Or just a “teacher,” if that seemed easier. Kuki said—since he would have liked to be one—that he was a VJ for MTV Lebanon. He was shaggily handsome, skinny as a heroin addict, and could put on a convincing Lebanese accent.

“Do you think anything you write will make a difference?” he asked me at our table looking out over the dance floor, lighting his last cigarette and crumpling the packet.

It was a good question, an existential question, and one I had begun asking myself. I liked to distinguish the work I did from “parachute journalism”—flying in and out and thinking you were an expert when you could have written the same thing without leaving the office—or from the kind of institutional newsgathering that took its cues from press conferences, which meant that whoever gave the press conference wrote the script. But I had been writing long enough to doubt my own contribution. The whole media landscape—so many articles, so much commentary, so much noise—was changing fast, disintegrating. One article, a thousand articles, however in-depth and penetrating, what could they actually do beyond letting me say I had tried?

George Orwell, in his famous essay “Why I Write,” said that aside from the need to earn a living, there were four great motives to write. The first is
sheer egoism
: “Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, to get your own back on the grown-ups who snubbed you in childhood, etc., etc.” The second is
aesthetic enthusiasm
: the perception of beauty in the world; the desire to share a valuable experience; pleasure in “the firmness of good prose or the rhythm of a good story.” The third and fourth motives interested me most.
Historical impulse
: “Desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity.” And finally,
political purpose
: “Using the word ‘political' in the widest possible sense. Desire to push the world in a certain direction….No book is genuinely free from political bias.”
¹¹
And, thinking about the article I
was writing on the refugee crisis, to push the world towards reckoning with the long-term consequences. To show them a human face.

It wasn't too late to find out a few “true facts”—as opposed to the other kind—and store them up for posterity, but it was too late, at least with the story I was writing, to change the present situations of the people whose lives I was documenting. They might, of course, go on to better days, but there was no question that what was done to them was done. The dead were dead; some people really had been driven mad with grief. Observation, recording, documenting, what difference could that make? If the answer was “nothing,” was I doing it just for selfish reasons: to make myself feel better, less useless, less angry at various injustices? In which case the whole enterprise was not much more than therapy.

“I don't know,” I told Kuki. Salsa music pounded at my ears. A woman with an Afro was showing the dance floor how it ought to be done. “I think,” Kuki said, blowing a thoughtful smoke ring, “that people are busy.” He knew a fair bit about life in the West and the sort of people who read in-depth analyses in highbrow publications. He had an American boyfriend—they met online—and was trying to get accepted to the United States through the UNHCR. His dream was to live in New York, to become a New Yorker. “You write something, they read it,” he said. “Maybe they feel something. But what do they
do
about it?”

Then he turned to his favourite subject. “How's your man?” he asked. “How does he feel about you being away?”

Ahlam and I had been introduced three days before my trip to the border by a Syrian journalist who was on his way to
see an Iraqi woman in Damascus's Little Baghdad—Sayeda Zainab—and invited me along. “She might be interesting for you.”

Ask Syrians what they thought of Little Baghdad and the word “backward” usually came up, or the joke about the two Iraqis expressing their surprise at seeing something unusual: a Syrian! The last time I had gone there my taxi driver, an avuncular man who believed he was dealing with a confused tourist, tried to talk me out of going. “There's nothing to see there,” he insisted into the rear-view mirror. “Just Iraqis.”

Home to three hundred thousand refugees, this was where Baghdad had transplanted itself. It was insular, poor and unstable—the Syrian secret police, the mukhabarat, hovered over Little Baghdad the way cops do around high-crime neighbourhoods.